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Category Archives: FAQs

All – I’m pleased to announce that the ThinApp Factory has now taken residence on our VMware GitHub location. What started out as a Fling and garnered plenty of valuable feedback has now come back to the community as a freely downloadable and customizable technology to be used by customers and partners. We’ve de-composed the appliance itself and provided documentation that allows you to re-assemble on the distribution of your choice or you can simply use the components and build your own better faster mousetrap if you choose.

Last week, VMware made some major announcements with regard to the arrival of the Horizon Suite and the new pricing and packaging framework to simplify and unite the VMware EUC technologies for our customers. This is a milestone for EUC because it marks a concerted effort by VMware to streamline the adoption and implementation of products into a solution stack that customers can easily procure and implement.

One of the changes that was announced is that at the end of the year ThinApp will no longer be sold as a standalone product as in the past. Unfortunately, the product support life cycle has limited terms of description so the ‘End of Availability’ announcement has caused some some concern as some interpreted this as EOA of the technology. I apologize for the confusion and want to clarify that the EOA term ONLY applies to the standalone SKU as ThinApp will actually be included in ALL of the Horizon bundles – VMware Horizon View™, VMware Horizon Mirage™, VMware Horizon Workspace™ and VMware Horizon Suite™. A good place to get a feel for the bundles can be found here – Horizon Suite. Being included across the Horizon suite means that more customers than ever will be able to use the features and capabilities of ThinApp. The Horizon licensing model still allows flexibility for ThinApp to be used on the desktop without any other products if that is the use case needed by the customer.

I highly encourage you to consider the affinity between Horizon Mirage and ThinApp as we now have the capability to address every application on the Windows desktop; if you need apps with drivers and remote DCOM then use Mirage application layers, if you need cross platform support or isolation then ThinApp containers are ideal. Not only do these technologies cover 100% of the application list but Mirage is an ideal deployment mechanism for ThinApp containers as it can deliver ThinApps to the farthest endpoints without any dependence on branch infrastructure, Active Directory, or costly backend architecture. Customers can deploy layers and containers and then inventory those endpoints for centralized management of both native and virtualized applications.

To be clear to our customers (and competitors), our commitment to ThinApp technology hasn’t changed as we are actively working on our next release for mid-year which will include some very tangible architectural and compatibility improvements. Here is an FAQ that has been created which should help address any particular details.

I’m often asked about best practices when it comes to cleaning up the project folder. This is not a simple subject because it varies greatly depending on the application you captured. I’ve been discussing with myself how to best attack this task. I ended up deciding for a blog post but this one will have the comments functionality turned on. This way I hope you, the readers, will help me make this post better by adding your own experience. I will now and then merge comments into the original post for ease of consumption.Continue reading →

Over the last four years I’ve been working with customers and partners on articulating and demonstrating the value of VMware ThinApp. While ThinApp does offer one of the most flexible and streamlined solutions for virtualizing Windows applications there are still times when you need to put the product knowledge and the application expert together to get the results you want. That has now occurred in written (and ebook) form with the release of the definitive guide for VMware ThinApp. The title, VMware ThinApp Essentials, much like the author, is understated as you will find the relevance of this book greatly exceeds the ‘essentials’. Yes, the author is one of our own VMware employees, but see for yourself that Peter Bjork always speaks to the reality of the customer environment and the satisfaction of well-implemented technology. Leverage Peter’s dedication to the technology, wide spectrum of application experience, and commitment to help you extract the most value out of your investment in application virtualization.

ThinApp Factory Feeds

What’s involved in creating a ThinApp Factory Feed or Recipe?

This is a post to describe the format and syntax for writing application feeds and recipes for ThinApp Factory.

What is a ThinApp Factory Feed? A feed is an online application source which can dynamically update applications whenever vendors patch and upgrade them. You can create your own feeds and add them to ThinApp Factory.

Today we are announcing the availability of ThinApp 4.7. VMware is introducing the enablement of ThinApp packages in a cloud-based deployment and management platform, VMware Horizon Application Manager.

Best practices packaging with ThinApp includes verifying nothing is being left running, locking the Sandbox, when the end-user shuts down the application. A simple method to verify nothing is running in the background is to try to delete the package’s Sandbox. If it is locked and you cannot delete it, something is still running.

To find out what it is I always use Sysinternals Process Explorer. This video will show you how to use Process Monitor to find out what is keeping the Sandbox opened.

How to solve the issue depends on what process we’re talking about. It can for example be an auto update process that needs to be disabled or as in this example the all to common ctfmon.exe. To solve ctfmon.exe (advanced text services) simply disable it within the virtual environment by adding below to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER.txt file.